business affairs of the companies, and various other important measures. The employers, with a strong organization dating from before the revolution, met this attack with desperate resistance. They were an untamed lot, accustomed under Czarism to treat their workers like dogs, and they were resolved not to lose any of their prerogatives. As the Spring and Summer of 1917 wore on the fight grew hotter and hotter. Great strikes raged in all the industrial centers. At first the workers, having a fair field, got the best of it; but about July, the Kerensky Government coming more and more to the assistance of the employers, the tide of battle turned gradually in the latter's favor and they entered into a huge campaign of lockouts and sabotage, calculated to bring the industries to a standstill and to starve the workers into submission.
Driven to extremes by these and other attacks, the workers, through their Soviets, upset the Kerensky Government (the October revolution) and seized political control themselves. Then, patterning after their erstwhile masters, they used the state power in their own behalf. This gave them definite ascendency over the employers. Lossovsky thus describes the situation:
"The October revolution made the workers the ruling class and the employers the subject class. It reversed the relations between employers and employees, and put the trade unions in the face of new tasks. Immediately after the October Revolution the strikes ceased. Thenceforth, the worker develops his grievances, presents them to the trade union and if it sanctions them they are put into force by the power of the state. In case an employer refuses, the worker has at his service the prison and all the other methods of persuasion prepared by the bourgeoisie. For the first time in the history of humanity the state takes part in strikes for the benefit of the worker, arrests the employer for refusing to grant the demands of the toilers establishes by decree wage scales fixed by the unions, an confiscates the factories of the recalcitrant employers."[1]
Although the workers nationalized the land and turned it over to the peasants the very day they overthrew the Kerensky Government, they intended to proceed only gradually with the nationalization of the complicated industries. To begin with they did nothing more than to install a strong "workers' control." This meant that the employers should still own the plants and also manage them—subject to a stringent super-
- ↑ "Les Syndicats en Russie Sovietiste," P. 22.
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